We all know it's awash in money. So why is the Alberta capital allowing second-rate buildings and an army of suburban big-box stores to choke the life out of its downtown?

LISA ROCHON, From 8 February 2006's Globe and Mail

EDMONTON - The city of Edmonton is unwell. A jumble of disconnected boxes with ways to escape the streets, above and below ground, defines the downtown. There's no money in the city coffers to fund streetscape improvements directly.

Along the boulevards, the Black Ash trees are thirsty for water. With little snow coverage this winter, they'll wither more come the summer.

Unthinkable choices are being made: A major view from the city to the magnificent North Saskatchewan River has been severed by a graceless extension of the city's convention centre. Iraqi-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid's winning design for the reinvention of the Art Gallery of Alberta has been passed over by the gallery board in favour of the second-place, second-rate submission by U.S. architect Randall Stout. And, one of the city's rare architectural gems of enduring power, the Royal Alberta Museum, will be doubled in size and renovated beyond recognition in the name of a so-called spectacular makeover.

The city of Edmonton is under siege. All around it is an army of big box retailers and suburban tract housing. How this happened is difficult to neatly sum up but my guess is that it has something to do with fear - fear of the elements, fear of the disorder of urban life, fear of each other.

The upshot is that the parkland landscape has been stripped of its complexity. Sameness of built form has grown at an astonishing rate. Power centres have increased by 50 per cent over the last five years, making Edmonton second only to Calgary as the nation's per capita leader in massively scaled retail development.

In 2001, there were 377 big-box retailers surrounding Edmonton's downtown. By 2005, according to Tony Hernandez, director of Ryerson University's centre for the study of commercial activity, there were 1,021 big-box stores.

Big, bigger or biggest, all the boxes and malls are privately owned, with security guards to ensure a pleasant shopping experience with none of the surprises or raw, joyous humanity of the street. Driving in from the airport, the unending sameness hits you hard in the eyes. This is what a zone free of a provincial tax on goods can deliver: the Alberta advantage, where everybody is guaranteed a free parking spot and there's no place to walk around.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to argue for Edmonton, Alberta's capital, to be included as one of Canada's major urban centres.

Edmontonians, by my estimate, are among the warmest, most hospitable people on earth. The culture of theatre is sharply felt in the downtown and there's a palpable desire shared by locals to assemble in auditoriums for one of the city's vibrant lecture series or, during the summer, at Sir Winston Churchill Square to experience the city's many festivals. Citizens are involved - they volunteer their time freely. Nobody would wish a dying city on the one-million people who call Edmonton their home.

But there's a war going on between what's inside of the city and what's outside. What makes the City of Edmonton especially vulnerable is the West Edmonton Mall. At 2.4-million square feet, the Mall, as it is affectionately known in these parts, is the granddaddy of all enclosed shopping environments, offering live shows with seals, terrazzo flooring and palm trees, a roller coaster to inspire vomitas, an enormous water park and a skating rink used as a community arena by seniors in the morning and, after school, by skimpily dressed skate-club competitors.

Here, on the outskirts of Edmonton, why hang in the city when you can find refuge from the winter and the spectacularization of the commodity? Sometimes you don't even need to shop. The mall opens early in the morning so you can go for a brisk walk under the fluorescent lights and call it a form of exercise.

Alberta may be awash in money, but money alone cannot heal the crisis of its historic capital. Only acts of daring and irreverence will prevent a failed experiment in urbanism.

Last year, the Art Gallery of Alberta (formerly the Edmonton Art Gallery) initiated a bold international competition to expand and reimagine its downtown facility. The architects on the jury, which included Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, Toronto architects Barry Sampson, Raymond Moriyama and New York architect Lise Anne Couture, selected the iconoclastic designer Hadid as the competition winner. But local representatives, including gallery director Tony Luppino and board chair Allan Scott, disagreed - enough to overturn the preference of the designers and name Los Angeles-based Stout as the competition winner.

Hadid, considered one of the world's most original architects, was the first woman to win the hugely prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. But she insulted Western hospitality by not showing up in Edmonton to make her final competition presentation. Stout, on the other hand, had impressed the gallery by making his presence felt in the city, and, though his swooping language of architecture originated with his former boss, Frank Gehry, he had convinced the locals of the buildability of his submission.

Bravo to the Art Gallery of Alberta for launching the competition; it turned Edmontonians on to the passion and polemics of architecture. The only problem was in its final choice. Going with Hadid would have delivered a daring result, and helped rescue Edmonton from its sullied reputation - a northern city that accepts an inordinate amount of second-rate architecture.

What role has the province of Alberta fashioned for itself? Road repair and road construction in Edmonton's suburbs are priorities. In its wisdom, the province has also decided to contribute $150-million over the next five years for the redevelopment of the Royal Alberta Museum. The so-called "spectacular makeover" will be led by Cohos Evamy Partners, described in the museum's press release as one of Alberta's most respected organizations. Of this I have no doubt, but, from what I've seen of their corporate work in Edmonton and at the University of Alberta, they're hardly the innovative authors of surgical, elegant interventions necessary to revitalize the downtown. In one of their most hurtful gestures, endorsed by the city's old-style urban-design review panel, Cohos Evamy designed an addition to the Shaw Conference Centre that shoots a blank wall across Jasper Avenue, eliminating sacred views to the North Saskatchewan River and its magnificent valley.

Anybody with an ability to wield power in Edmonton needs to step forward now and act in the name of the city. Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel has indicated that his "tolerance for crap is zero" - excellent - but until he initiates a round-table discussion on beauty in the city and puts the brakes on building permits for endless sprawl (the average permit takes a mere four months to secure), those words add up to nothing. A revamped and more powerful Edmonton Design Committee is set to begin its important work in March. Besides that, more money needs to be found to lure people back downtown. Favouring people - not cars - needs to be the priority, with widened sidewalks, street furniture and the planting of well-irrigated trees.

Think big for the City of Edmonton. Bring on more national and international competitions for all major private and public buildings and watch a renaissance of architecture unfold. Give young practitioners a chance to build in the city. Then, think bigger. What if boring, stodgy, hunkered-down buildings in the downtown could be replaced by architecture of light to capture the big Alberta sky? What if architecture of the exultant roofline could be expressed in the city the way it was during the 1970s by the late architect Peter Hemingway at the Muttart Conservatory in the city's river valley and at the Peter Hemingway Fitness and Leisure Centre (the renamed Coronation Pool)? What if half the parking lots in the suburbs could be converted into exhilarating public space and mixed-income housing?

At my lecture last week at the Art Gallery of Alberta, there was evidence of an unbounded energy for Edmonton. The event was sold out and people sat on the stairs. They stuck around afterwards, drinking martinis late into the night. These people love living in Edmonton. It's only reasonable that the city starts loving them back.

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Editor's Note - Interestingly, there are some discussions online following the Rochon story with different opinions. One is on the MADE in Edmonton forum (ROCK IT) and the other is on the popular indie music and punk site, Indecline.net (ROCK IT).

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And this was Rochon's jotted letter to Edmonton

Speaker: David H. Whitfield

Construction and Demolition Waste is a million tonne a year per year issue in Alberta, and the momentum in the industry is shifting towards diversion from landfill and treating these materials like the resources they are. With the adoption of LEED and other environmental certification programs; owners, developers, architects and contractors are all taking a very active interest.

Focussed management of construction wastes not only saves disposal costs, or earns some points towards a certification program: it results in a cleaner, safer worksite. This session will address the wealth of resources available to project managers, designers, and specification writers including sources of sample specifications, reporting documents, project design idea, markets for material, and sources of recycled- content products.

Dave holds an Honours Diploma in Business Administration from SAIT. Initially, he focussed on human resource development; however, the past 23 years have been dedicated to consulting and employment roles involving project development in waste management and recycling. He was one of the founding members of the Recycling Council of Alberta and serves on the Board of Directors. In his role of Regional Waste Minimization Specialist for Alberta Environment, he is responsible for developing programs with high potential for waste diversion.

Seating is limited! Confirm attendance by faxing your name, phone number, and e-mail address to 780-408-4585 by Tuesday, 14 February. (Yes, that is tomorrow. Sorry. we just received the notice.)

5:30 to 8:00 p.m., Wednesday, 15 February 2006
Glenrose Room, Royal Glenora Club
1160 River Valley Road
Cost: $35 (includes GST)

Cocktails: 5:30 to 6:00
Dinner and Chapter Update: 6:00 to 6:45
Featured Speaker: 6:45 to 8:00

The Adobe Creative Suite 2 Expert Series, hosted by a unique group of well known design and software experts, will take you down the path of enhanced creativity, efficiency and workflow. You'll come away with a clear understanding of why so many of your industry peers are taking advantage of the many exciting facets of Creative Suite 2 to enhance their ideas and creativity.

Your Creative Hub
Let Anne-Marie Concepción - affectionately known as "Her Geekness" - take you on a fun and informative look at how to use the Adobe Bridge feature in CS2 to enhance your workflow efficiency - and give you more time for creativity.
Tuesday, Feb. 21st 10 AM PST, 1 hr.

InDesign Typography Tips and Tricks
Always informative - and opinionated - David Blatner will explain how to get the most out of the many typographical features of Adobe InDesign. And while he's at it, he'll show you why he thinks Adobe InDesign CS2 is leaving QuarkXPress in the dust.
Wednesday, Feb. 22nd 10 AM PST, 1 hr.

Discover Adobe Illustrator CS2
Think you know Adobe Illustrator? Mordy Golding will show you even more - by demonstrating the many new features of Adobe Illustrator CS2 that make it an even more robust and useful tool for your creativity.
Thursday, Feb. 23nd 10 AM PST, 1 hr.

Register for these FREE informative and inspirational eSeminars today!

Dress to Suit is hosting a VIP appreciation event on 23 February. The event is also a fundraiser for iHuman. iHuman is an not-for-profit organisation that assists youth in getting off the streets and out of gangs and other street-related activities. iHuman motivates the youth by fostering and assisting in the development of the youths' artistic and creative sides. During the evening, we will have displays of the art, music, and paintings which will be available for sale. In addition to this we will have for sale the new spring shirt samples of which we will be donating $2.00 per shirt and we will pay the GST for you.

The new colours for men this spring are bold and exciting and this is the theme used for the catering as well. Those of you who have seen our CTV advertisements, will definitely recognize Jason Mielke, creator of The 24 hr HERO, who will be on hand to autograph photos. Jason is a strong supporter of charities and has also donated several Mondetta vests for a silent auction.

Dress to Suit Boutique
12070 Jasper Avenue
780 482 1154

Our doors will be open from 7:00 - 10:00 p.m. on 23 February, please drop in and if you can please RSVP to so we can give the heads up to our caterer:

Destined to be different than any other craft or art sale you've been to

4 & 5 March 2006
Red Strap Art Market
10305 97 Street, 2nd Floor
10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Admission is $2

Crafts have long been pushed aside as something only your grandmother does. However over the last few years younger people are taking it on as their own. It's not just women either, men are embracing their crafty side and not only hiding behind the title of "Artist". With this resurgence of the craft scene there was a need for a place for local crafters and artists to meet, swap and hock their wares. Which is where Arts vs Crafts has come in.

Arts vs. Crafts Three has attracted various members of the D.I.Y. craft and art scene to bring a unique shopping experience to Edmonton. Vendors working in a variety of crafty mediums will display high style, unique designs and inexpensive finds: needlepoint, knitting, jewelry, fashion, photography, and more.

Some notable new vendors involved with the sale include Raymond Biesinger, illustrator extraodinaire. you may have seen his artwork on gig posters, record sleeves or in periodicals fifteen.ca; Linda Ha from Sire of Tate, who creates dolls, clothes, bags and knitted goods. sireoftate.com. As well some of your favorites from pervious sales are coming back including Element Botanicals and Good Girl Threads.

For additional information about the sale and our vendors visit:

Alberta Wood WORKS! is a Canadian Wood Council initiative established to promote the use of Canadian wood products. The Annual Wood WORKS! Awards Gala celebrates excellence in wood use and construction. The Gala serves as an opportunity to recognize and honor champions, professionals and organizations that foster wood use and innovoative solutions in wood construction and design.

Residential - New and renovated residential buildings such as homes, cottages, and cabins that incorporate and utilize unique and or a variety of wood product applications both structurally and architecturally.

Multi-Unit Residential - Multi-Unit (2+stories) residential and mixed use buildings such as hotels, apartments, condominiums, residence, and seniors housing that incorporate and utilize unique and or a variety of wood products and applications both structurally and architecturally.

Commercial / Institutional - Large (approx. >5000sqft) commercial, industrial and institutional buildings such as education facilities, churches, libraries, warehouse, retail stores, office, shopping (box) stores, and hospitals that incorporate and utilize unique and or a variety of wood products and applications both structurally and architecturally.

Municipal / Recreational - Municipal or residential buildings such as courthouses, firehalls, police stations, interpretative centres, visitor centres, and recreation centres, that incorporate and utilize unique and or a variety of wood products and applications both structurally and architecturally.

Engineer - An engineer or engineering firm that advocated wood use or employed innovative structural wood applications or overcame challenges to wood use to a particular project.

Architect - An architect or architectual firm that advocated wood use or employed innovative structural wood applications or overcame challenges to wood use to a particular project.

Industry Champion - An individual who has demonstrated support for the forest and wood products industry, and stands out as a persuasive advocate for building with wood in Alberta and/or his or her community.

For information on how to enter or nominate someone (deadline is 24 February), please visit:

The McMullen Gallery
University of Alberta Hospital
Call for Submissions

The McMullen Gallery at the University of Alberta Hospital seeks proposals for the exhibition year April 2007 to April 2008. Receiving 16,000 visitors in 2005, the McMullen is an exhibition venue and patient comfort zone. The McMullen offers an opportunity for art, culture and heritage exhibitions - an opportunity to innovate, explore and experiment with the interpretation of objects, exhibition design, display techniques, and how visitors learn. The McMullen Gallery is a 900 sq. ft. gallery consisting of 175 running feet in a highly public, yet secure area - located next to the main entrance of the University Hospital.

Submissions should include:

• Completed application form
• Description of exhibition or curatorial statement
• Digital images or slides with documentation (photographs will not be accepted)
• List of artists and their CV's, biographies and or statements
• Budget expectations

Preference will be given to proposals which:

• Promote 3 or more artists
• Sensitive in content to the needs of hospital patients and their families
• Outline resources to assist our 'first time' gallery visitors such as extended labels, artists' statements and visitor feeback opportunities
• Provide 'hands-on' or sensory exploration opportunities for visitors

Deadline: 31 March 2006

To request a submission form and application or for further information please contact:

Michelle Casavant, Art Program Manager
780-407-7152
mcasavan@capitalhealth.ca

Vanderleelie Gallery is very pleased to present the work of Peter von Tiesenhausen in Convergence. This exhibition brings together three streams of work - painting, sculpture and installation - with the common theme of humanity's impact on the natural environment.

Convergence is von Tiesenhausen's first commercial exhibition in Edmonton in the past several years. He has gained wide acclaim for his site-specific installations firepane and his unusual approaches to materials.

A selection of paintings and sculptures is available for viewing on our website at vanderleelie.ab.ca. The exhibition opens next Saturday, 18 February, and runs until 8 March. There will be an opening reception from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., with the artist in attendance.

Vanderleelie Gallery 10183 112 Street, Edmonton
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Phone: 780-452-0286 or toll-free at 1-877-826-3375
Fax: 780-451-1615

For Peter von Tiesenhausen's site:

Processing is an open-source project initiated by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is "a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities," which aims to teach the basics of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks. One of the stated aims of Processing is to act as a tool to get non-programmers started with programming, through the instant gratification of visual feedback. It is a language that builds on Java, simplifying features and creating a few new ones.

Processing includes a "sketchbook," a minimal alternative to an IDE for organizing projects.

Processing is increasingly being used in schools and universities to teach programming to non-technical students and beginners. It is also widely being adopted as the programming language of choice among people working in visual media and arts. It has also spawned another project, Wiring, which uses the Processing IDE together with a simplified version of the C language as a way to teach artists how to program microcontrollers. There are now two separate hardware projects, Wiring and Arduino, using the Wiring environment and language. Another spin-off project, Mobile Processing by Francis Li, allows software written using the Processing programming language and environment to run on Java Powered mobile devices.

In 2005 Reas and Fry won the prestigious Golden Nica award from Ars Electronica in its Net Vision category for their work on Processing.

A Flickr photo pool devoted to a Photoshop CS2 plugin has accumulated hundreds of beautiful pictures. The "High Dynamic Range" plug-in merges several shots of the same scene taken at different exposures, producing pictures that have breathtaking, vivid, hyperreal colours. The HDR pool on Flickr is filled with astonishing examples of the form, and active discussions of the best way to capture great HDR images.

It's basically a way to 'digitally develop' your digital photos using information contained in multiple exposures of the same shot.

Say you exposure bracket the same shot. You can merge all three files into one 32-bit file and use the data contained in the images to create one master output preserving accurate details from all exposures.

More information here:

www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/hdr.shtml

Recovering HDR from images

Rendering with Natural Light

www.astropix.com/HTML/J_DIGIT/PS_HDR.HTM

And check out the Flickr pool:

Two eye-popping projects discovered while checking Noticias Arquitectura this morning. Makes me wonder why Mississauga, Ontario, and Louisville, Kentucky, of all places, is garnering more exciting work than we are?

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Mexican architect Michel Rojkind's proposal for Your Absolute to be built in Mississauga , Ontario is by far my favourite one among all the finalists of the competition.

The skyscraper would be a concrete structure with a central core and a double membrane that would make it possible to reduce the section of columns and beams, making a 60-story building appear very light.

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When it's completed in 2010, Museum Plaza will thrust 61 stories into Louisville's skyline and include an acre-sized public "island," a contemporary art museum, restaurants and retail stores, 85 luxury condominiums, 150 lofts, a 300-room hotel, office space and a 1,100-car underground parking garage.

Designed by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (founded by Rem Koolhaas and headquartered in Rotterdam), the structure would be one building composed of many smaller buildings - a city block contained in one structure. The structure has four legs below the island and three towers above it. All seven structures intersect on the island.

The island where the public will be able to mingle, would have several gallery spaces that can expand or shrink as needed for art installations. It also will contain a swimming pool, shops and restaurants, a hotel bar. The galleries will be able to be altered so they can spill into other spaces on the island. An artist, for example, might want to use the pool for an installation - or the hotel bar as part of an art piece.

Via we-make-money-not-art:

Some 4,000 drawings, models and audio tapes produced by Archigram is to be catalogued and digitised over three years and made available to the public on a special website.

Archigram dominated the architectural avant garde in the 1960s and early 1970s with its pop-inspired visions of a technocratic future.

"A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of 'Modern' yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel - any length. You can blow up a balloon - any size. You can mould plastic - any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge - they didn't worry," wrote David Greene in 1961.

Two of the group's cult projects: the Walking City, in which a city of reptilian structures glided across the globe on enormous legs until its inhabitants found a place where they wanted to settle; and the crane-mounted living pods that could be plugged in wherever their inhabitants wished in Plug-in City.

The group also imagined that miniature devices could fulfil the functions of traditional buildings: capsule homes like Gasket Homes and Living Pod, or the Cushicle mobile environment and wearable house, the Suitaloon. In 1968, the group proposed to transport all the entertainment and education resources of a metropolis in an Instant City airship, which would fly from place to place and temporarily land in communites to enable the inhabitants to enjoy the buzz of life in a city.

In 1969, the group opened an architectural practise after winning a competition to design a leisure centre in Monte-Carlo. The design was of an enormous circular dome buried underground by the Mediterranean.

The funding collapsed and the leisure centre was never built. When the practise dissolved in 1974, Archigram had realised three projects: a children's playground in Milton Keynes, an exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in London and a swimming pool for the singer Rod Stewart (wish i could find a picture of this one).

Via we make money not art via archinect via Building Design. Background info and images on the Design Museum, Gabion, and Arcspace websites.

As I sit in front of the desk of the office of my first design job - yup, first - I've been thinking about the six-month journey that led me to this point. Furthermore, this time spent in the job-hunting trenches was such a learning experience, I feel as though it is worth sharing everything I've encountered. This may or may not help the next design graduate in line, seeking an awesome design job.

So here goes.

What kind of market will there be for straight web designers in 5 years? Or 2 years? Or next year? Is 'web designer' going to be the next 'webmaster'?

When I first started web design, it was late 1998. I was working on the help desk at a financial planning provider, explaining to accountants over the phone how they could make MS Word show borders on table cells. We had a website in 1998, an extranet actually, but it was 'designed' by the developers who built it, and you can imagine how unique it looked.

Within a couple of weeks I had wheedled my way into the webmaster role, one the back of my single html course at University and strongly held personal opinions. They were heady days filled with nested font tags and Frontpage server components, and tables as far as the mouse could scroll.

Since then, web design as a profession has taken off, millions of people do it for free and tools and templates can provide in seconds what I used to grind out for days.

This is exactly as it should be. The continuing spread of the ability to communicate on the web, the continual lowering of technological and financial barriers. The only question is: How much longer will we need web designers?

This site is for everyone involved or interested in creating web sites - whether novice or expert. It will help you understand what makes web sites succeed or fail, and what can be done to increase the chance of success.

You don't have to be a web designer to benefit from this site. You may have a current web site design project, you may be updating an existing site, or just interested in learning new skills.

Web design and development is a huge area that grows and changes every day. While it's impossible to document everything there is to know, this site aims to help you understand the principles of creating great sites and to teach you some of the most important skills needed to do it successfully and repeatedly.

Zoo Publishing is a new company, publishing downloadable online magazines, based in the United Kingdom. Zoo currently produces two online downloadable magazines, 3dcreative and 2dartist. Zoo's intention is to make each issue as full of great articles, images, reviews, interviews, images and tutorials as possible.

This is quality, worth checking out if you're into digital arts:

There are literally hundreds of examples of humankind's use of the Golden Proportion in its artworks and architecture, and here we will show a few of them. These examples have been chosen because it is felt that they prove beyond any doubt that their creators very consciously intended their creations to be wholly based on this beautiful proportion.

Also covered on this site are the Intro to Phi, Phi in Geometry, and Phi in Nature.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has identified what it has called the top 10 art crimes worldwide, which includes:

• From 7,000 to 10,000 looted and stolen Iraqi artefacts, 2003
• 12 paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1990
• Two Renoirs and one Rembrandt from Sweden's National Museum, 2000 (two recovered)
• Munch's The Scream and The Madonna from the Munch Museum in Oslo, 2004
• Benevenuto Cellini Salt Cellar from Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2003
• Caravaggio's Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco from Palermo, 1969
• Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius violin from a New York apartment, 1995
• Two Van Gogh paintings from Amsterdam's Vincent Van Gogh Museum, 2002
• Cezanne's View of Auvers-sur-Oise from Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, 1999
• Leonardo's Madonna with the Yarnwinder from Scotland's Drumlanrig Castle, 2003

This is a continuous mix compilation CD, showcasing 20 of our favorite mash-ups from the past year. Compile in order with no gaps between songs - perfect for parties! (And Calgary's Tegan & Sara made it into the fold.) Follow the link to download.

1. Party Ben - Paid For My Doorbell (Eric B. & Rakim vs. White Stripes)
2. Torero - Hot Rich Girls Dropped In A Grange (Gwen Stefani vs. Snoop Dogg vs. ZZ Top)
3. The Lovemakers - Shake That 50 Cent (50 Cent vs. The Lovemakers)
4. Jay-R - S.L.H. (Sri Lanka High) (M.I.A. vs. The Ramones)
5. A plus D - An Honest M.I.A. (M.I.A. vs. The Bravery)
6. Party Ben - Somebody Rock Me (The Killers vs. The Clash)
7. Ruff Muff - La La Her Madly (The Doors vs. Goldfrapp)
8. Earworm - Since U Been Gahan (Kelly Clarkson vs. Rex The Dog vs. Depeche Mode)
9. Party Ben - Walking With A Ghost In Paris (Tegan & Sara vs. Mylo)
10. Party Ben - Computer Talk (Coldplay vs. Kraftwerk)
11. Loo & Placido - Black Beatles (Beatles vs. Black-Eyed Peas vs. Ludacris vs. Kelis)
12. King of Pants - Badd To Me (Ying Yang Twins vs. The Cure)
13. DJ Riko - P-Funk Is Playing At My House (LCD Soundsystem vs. Gerald A. vs. Katie Enlow)
14. Thriftshop XL - Do You Wanna Cuz It's Tricky (Franz Ferdinand vs. Run-DMC vs. The Knack)
15. Brat - Big Shot Pimpin' (Billy Joel vs. Jay-Z)
16. DJ John - It Takes Two To Kiss (Rob Base vs. Prince)
17. Tripp - Super Holla Tricka (Beastie Boys vs. Gwen Stefani vs. A. Skillz & Krafty Kutz)
18. Jay-R - My Other Car Is A Beatle (L'Trimm vs. Armand Van Helden vs. Beatles vs. Gary Numan)
19. Jimmi Jammes - Sgt. Pepper's Paradise (Beatles vs. Guns N' Roses)
20. Cheekyboy - Smells Like Compton (N.W.A. vs. Nirvana)

NextEngine is a $2,500 (USD) 3D desktop laser scanner requiring no special background or lighting and has a field size of 13.5" × 10.1", which features multiple optics arrays and dual three megapixel CMOS sensors and some laser triangulation technology for capturing models of objects, which rotate on a platter out in front. (Also includes additional software to generate composite models from multiple scans.)

DISCLAIMER: Podcasts aren't regulated by the FCC. In fact they aren't regulated by anyone. For some of you, that might be a lot of the charm. For others, it may not. Due to explicit content, some of the podcasts I'm linking to in this story might not be suitable for you or your young ones. I'll make a note where that holds especially true.

In the early days of podcasts (last March), it was simply audio. Now, like an old VHS tape recorded in SLP and sped up, or an old Star Trek episode where a techeon pulse causes time to speed up, podcasts have evolved to now feature video.

Thanks to unregulated old-west-like lawlessness of the internet, video podcasts have come about with an eclectic and somewhat surreal feel that goes against the whole established video media. I know, it sounds like I'm posturing way too much, but from where I'm sitting - daily watching new and often weird video podcasts popping up - I can't help but feel that this is a rare and fleeting moment in which to witness something really special while it's still in its infancy.

All you really need is a computer that can play Quicktime and Windows Media files and you can watch these things in all their glory. But for the best experience you can't beat iTunes for finding, subscribing, and downloading video and audio podcasts and I highly recommend it.

Now that that's out of the way, here are ten favourite video podcasts:

the rank is a design resource site, with new links and news available via RSS feed!

http://hello.the-rank.com/

There's tons of cool music videos that never see the inside of your television. Allow me to train your retinas on some that I think deserve more attention than they have gotten.

10. Soulwax "E Talking"
Here's the Sesame Street on drugs version of a night out at the club.

9. Snow Patrol "Chocolate"
Ah. the end of the world.

8. Vitalic "Poney, Part 1"
Repeated viewings will put you in some sort of zen like dog-induced trance.

7. Stephen Malkmus "Baby C'mon"
Quite inventive use of stop motion to overcome a lack of budget.

6. The Decemberists "16 Military Wives"
Kid's Afterschool Special + Royal Tenenbaums + US Foreign Policy = Rocking Video

5. Röyksopp "What Else Is There?"
Hauntingly beautiful images and the first of two videos on my list by insanely talented Danish director Martin de Thura.

4. Phoenix Foundation "Hitchcock"
Director Reuben Sutherland shows what it would look like if Grand Theft Auto physics worked in the real world.

3. Kasabian "Cutt Off"
I just love how coldblooded and perfect this video is.

2. U.N.K.L.E. "An Eye For An Eye"
Perfectly done animation for a song that will stay with you for days.

1. Carpark North "Human"
A Danish band you never heard of with the best video I saw in 2005. Director Martin de Thura combines the pains of childhood with a great "Children of the Damned" vibe. This is what Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters would look like in the real world.

Posted by Razen on YesButNoButYes: